Why are balance patches so rare?

I like content but i dought more balance patches would come at the cost of new content.

The thought of pulling the devs from new lw updates raids or fractals, wvw or pvp to make some balance changes scares me.

New content is great but i view more balance patches as an evenly importand part of the game.

They do have a balance team.

Balance patches usually happen in the PvP off season to keep it fair. The current season will only finish on the 16th, so don't expect anything until afterwards.

Ofc. Ik when the patch should come. Im argueing that the inbetween time from patch to patch is too long.

Sorry, I assumed you didn't know that since you weren't aware the balance team existed.

The real question is, why are tiny reasonable patches so rare? Deathly chill was insanely OP in WvW. Anet did nothing. It destroyed the balance between condi and power completely. Anet still did nothing. They fixed it in PvP. But they didnt care about that other PvP. They never did fix it. And now its been replaced by an even worse scourge.

@onevstheworld.2419 said:Sorry, I assumed you didn't know that since you weren't aware the balance team existed.

Some questionable changes makes me question if the balance team does exist.

There is a minimum time between balance patch if for no other reason than the need to see how the previous changes affect things. It takes time for people to figure how to handle/make use of the changes. Well in theory at least.

On the other hand we never get to play the game as intended because there is always some bug with a skills/traits somewhere so there has never been a time where everything worked as intended. Not sure how balance testing could ever have worked with that kind of situation.

@Khisanth.2948 said:There is a minimum time between balance patch if for no other reason than the need to see how the previous changes affect things. It takes time for people to figure how to handle/make use of the changes. Well in theory at least.

On the other hand we never get to play the game as intended because there is always some bug with a skills/traits somewhere so there has never been a time where everything worked as intended. Not sure how balance testing could ever have worked with that kind of situation.

Im sure that time window can be smaller than 3 months. Just like when they apply changes to encounters in pve it only takes them a month at most before they rebalance it.

@zealex.9410 said:I like content but i dought more balance patches would come at the cost of new content.

The thought of pulling the devs from new lw updates raids or fractals, wvw or pvp to make some balance changes scares me.

New content is great but i view more balance patches as an evenly importand part of the game.

We have a balance patch every 3 month. This is not slow by any means. Though I agree that some specs are broken and should have not been released they we they were.

As others said, expect changes next week.

@Dawdler.8521 said:The real question is, why are tiny reasonable patches so rare? Deathly chill was insanely OP in WvW. Anet did nothing. It destroyed the balance between condi and power completely. Anet still did nothing. They fixed it in PvP. But they didnt care about that other PvP. They never did fix it. And now its been replaced by an even worse scourge.

Because WvW balance is a joke of a concept.

Tell me how you reasonably expect to have balance in a mode that has battles ranging from 1v1 to 1v50 to 50v50v50. When you figure that one out you can expect WvW specific balance. Until then, you'll have to make due with using the PvE balance as WvW is just that.

@onevstheworld.2419 said:They do have a balance team.

Balance patches usually happen in the PvP off season to keep it fair. The current season will only finish on the 16th, so don't expect anything until afterwards.

That doesn't fly anymore since they dropped an entire new set of imbalanced elite specs on us right in the middle of a season.

They've never had a good handle on this. They seem to think that being overly cautious and taking copious amounts of time to make balance changes is good for the game when I'd argue it's the opposite. Balance is iterative, so doing it slowly just means you're iterating slowly, which isn't good. It increases the likelihood of myopia taking over and the execution of bad changes that end up being left alone, or no changes where changes are needed. The best example I can think of is Thief's Pistol - it was terrible for four entire years before they finally did an extensive enough rework to make it not terrible by buffing Vital Shot (badly needed with the initiative system) and reworking Unload - something the set clearly needed from day one. Had I been in charge, those two things would have been done the first month the game was out.

Generally, skill/trait reworks and buffs excite more players than nerfs piss off, despite the way it looks on the forum. Releasing regular balance patches is the best way to keep the meta always changing and keep the game feeling fresh.

Its because the balance team is too small. They have 3(?) devs on it, and these devs are also in charge of designing new elite specs for the expansions, which are coming out ~every 2 years. Not to mention they have to balance for 2 different game modes ( and should be balancing for 3 game modes, WvW needs its own balancing). 3 devs balancing 9 classes, 18 elite specializations, for 2.5 game modes, on top of having to design 9 new elite specs every 1.5-2 years is just too much. They can't get balance patches out in time.

If you don't believe me, their most common answer in the last balance patch AMA (back on the old forums) was "We wanted to do X but we didn't have time ". They simply need more devs on this team. Double the number at least, and that would give us enough devs on the balance team to do full overhauls like they did for guard spirit weapons, mesmer phantasm attacks, mesmer scepter a while ago.

@zealex.9410 said:I like content but i dought more balance patches would come at the cost of new content.

The thought of pulling the devs from new lw updates raids or fractals, wvw or pvp to make some balance changes scares me.

New content is great but i view more balance patches as an evenly importand part of the game.

There are several reasons for balance patches to happen less frequently than we hope:

• It takes a long time to balance.
• It takes time for the community to absorb the last balance changes.
• It takes a lot of data before ANet can see how we're actually using, not using, or abusing skills & traits.
• The community as a whole will never be satisfied with the balance in the game: there are always going to be elementalists who can't stand the idea of having a merely overpowered class because they got used to being grossly OP'd and necros who can't stand the idea that their class is awesome but rarely in the top 10 for raids.

I'm sure @"OriOri.8724" is on to something by suggesting that the team is probably also too small to review/change more often. However, I haven't seen anything that convinces me that having a bigger team (with more frequent changes) would be definitively better for the game as a whole. I think it would be interesting to see ANet try, but I don't know what plans/support they'd have to drop to make that happen.

tl;dr balancing is more costly and tricky than most of us realize and it's impossible to get it "right" for everyone. It might not be worth the investment to rebalance more often than between PvP seasons.

Because balance changes are not something you rush out all willy-nilly.

More people isn't necessary going to improve things. Class balance needs to be looking at the big picture. Last thing we need is balancing going in 9 different directions. That can be mitigated by communications on where to go but now you spending that extra time you gained on meetings to decide on the direction to go and other communication overhead.

My prob isnt with the size of the team if the size is the main factor that makes the patches come so slow then surely thats what needs to be adressed. As for the comments "the community needs to see how stuff works and how balance patches affect the game" they can do so in less than 2 months. Id argue with the size of balance patches each time and with the fact that parts of the game arent even touched each balance patch That they can see the feedback and balance accordingly faster.

I'm a Power Reaper, getting attention from this balance team seems like a school nurse saving me from a gunshot wound with a band aide with cartoon characters on it while telling me to take a nap on the cot in the back of the Nurse's office.

I remember an old dev post from early in GW2's release that mentioned Anet was aiming for balance patches that don't cause instant overnight radical shifts in the meta/strategies but rather, slowly tone down imbalanced skills and strategies.

EXAMPLEA class is dealing say, 45k DPS in PVE and Anet wants to drop it down to 35k, so they release a series of balance patches over the course of a year by making a tweak to each contributing factor in each patch.

The first patch might have two traits nerfed by 5% each, in another patch 3 months later, one or two key skills might have their activation times or cooldown times increased or amount of hits they do reduced by a bit, etc. Repeat again for a third or even a fourth patch.

By the end of the year, the class will have been reduced to 35k DPS in PVE and fans might be furious about it, but they aren't up in arms like they used to be in GW1's balance patches.

Compare that to GW1, where a build would get all their key skills nerfed all at once and cause a lot of angry people to scream about it.

I said it once before, but I hate the infrequent balance patches. We all know that Anet is going to get it wrong in the end, so they might as well update and get it wrong frequently than take forever to just mess up anyway. Balance is nigh impossible, but the least they can do is fix obvious problems first. The advantage to having quick balance patches it that, even if you are more likely to make a mistake, that mistake will persist for much less time.

@Khisanth.2948 said:More people isn't necessary going to improve things. Class balance needs to be looking at the big picture. Last thing we need is balancing going in 9 different directions. That can be mitigated by communications on where to go but now you spending that extra time you gained on meetings to decide on the direction to go and other communication overhead.

You're right, that wouldn't be good either. But right now, in the last AMA from the balance team, we were told over and over that they didn't have time to do what they wanted to do, and these balance patches are 3+ months apart. If they don't have time for this stuff its because the team is doing too many things with too few developers.

We've literally been told that they just don't have the time. Almost all players agree that more frequent balance patches is better, and since the team doesn't have time, the only solution is to give them more devs, or to take some stuff off their plate and give it to other devs (which, in the end, is more or less the same thing as give them more devs).

3 people to balance 9 classes, 18 elite specs, while also designing the next 9 elite specializations is simply too few. We need at least 2 more devs on that team. Otherwise we'll never get more frequent balance patches, because they just don't have the time to do it.

@Oldirtbeard.9834 said:I'm a Power Reaper, getting attention from this balance team seems like a school nurse saving me from a gunshot wound with a band aide with cartoon characters on it while telling me to take a nap on the cot in the back of the Nurse's office.

I know that feeling. Been playing Power-Reaper since I began playing this game 2 years ago and never shifted to conditions.I hope Anet has a few plans for us in their backhand.

@Arzurag.7506 said:

@Oldirtbeard.9834 said:I'm a Power Reaper, getting attention from this balance team seems like a school nurse saving me from a gunshot wound with a band aide with cartoon characters on it while telling me to take a nap on the cot in the back of the Nurse's office.

A band aide with Sponge Bob printed on it with an Aspirin.

@zealex.9410 said:As for the comments "the community needs to see how stuff works and how balance patches affect the game" they can do so in less than 2 months.

It's a fact that the majority of the community doesn't adapt as fast as Quantify and other top players do. ANet has said it takes time for them to collect the data, identify issues, and then it also takes time to come up with a plan for how to address it, and adjust as needed. None of us can say how long it should take unless we get access to the same data that ANet is using, but we can say, based on ANet's comments that ANet doesn't think it can be done within 2 months (or at least, not for a full balance pass).

@DanteZero.9736 said:I remember an old dev post from early in GW2's release that mentioned Anet was aiming for balance patches that don't cause instant overnight radical shifts in the meta/strategies but rather, slowly tone down imbalanced skills and strategies.

EXAMPLEA class is dealing say, 45k DPS in PVE and Anet wants to drop it down to 35k, so they release a series of balance patches over the course of a year by making a tweak to each contributing factor in each patch.

The first patch might have two traits nerfed by 5% each, in another patch 3 months later, one or two key skills might have their activation times or cooldown times increased or amount of hits they do reduced by a bit, etc. Repeat again for a third or even a fourth patch.

By the end of the year, the class will have been reduced to 35k DPS in PVE and fans might be furious about it, but they aren't up in arms like they used to be in GW1's balance patches.

Compare that to GW1, where a build would get all their key skills nerfed all at once and cause a lot of angry people to scream about it.

That whole spiel got thrown out the window less then 6 months after that statement, as they made sweeping changes to multiple skills that caused a massive shift that side lined half the meta in one night....... because Rev would love to know what this shaving approach is like.

The big issue is ultimately the disconnect that exists between the Dev's and the player base. This is mostly unavoidable due to the nature of the beast...... however, I'm abnormally concerned at the level of disparity in this case, combined with a particular level of arrogance shown by 2 individuals in charge of class design. The Devs might have the metrics on actual game play.... but its not clear if they understand how players navigate the system, given key choices in the Spec system since its inception. The Ranger spec in particular is a microcosm of all these problems, with its many traits with complicated conditional triggers, inconsistent synergy between traits and skills, the power budget division between Ranger and pet (which was insisted that we [players] were not using it right), and a number of BiS traits that span multiple builds.... which makes the least amount of sense considering the almost polar shift between core and druid.

The solution required is expansive.... going far beyond just the team setup, and requires a commitment to converting PvE encounter design to better match PvP/WvW combat. As long as those modes are in constant opposition, even splitting ALL the skills won't be enough to reconcile the underlying problem.